I think the most difficult lesson I’ve learned in my 30’s is that growing up and being more responsible doesn’t have to mean giving up on your dreams and selling yourself short. The struggles are a little more painful, the pressing concerns a little more mundane, but amazing things are still possible in life. In some respects, they’re more possible then they were when I was younger.

I need to remind myself of that more often. Life is too short to let it be unremarkable.

There are days where it feels like I’m walking a mile long tightrope over shark-infested waters, trying to make it across in time to catch a train to the future I’ve dreamed of. And then there are the bad days.

My mother has commented several times in my life that I have the “survivor gene”, that no matter what happens in my life, I’ll survive and endure. I think it’s important to note that I didn’t say “prosper”, because that isn’t always guaranteed. But survive? Not a problem. My totem animal is the cockroach, and I’ll get through just about anything.

It didn’t always seem that way. Without unpacking all of my childhood damage for the reading public, there was some not insignificant abuse in my youth. It lingered with me, and from the moment I learned about the ‘cycle of abuse’, I was terrified that a monster lived in my DNA, just waiting to come out and fuck with somebody else’s life. I went through much of high school desperately afraid of becoming my father. In hindsight, it’s kind of amazing that I made it through those years without exploding from that sort of self-imposed pressure.

But I did. I’ve survived abuse, homelessness, attempted muggings, broken hearts, financial distress, and more. Somewhere along the lines, I began to realize that this is simply what I do. I survive.

I’d like to think that everyone has it in them, that it isn’t a “gene”, and we’re all capable of surviving crazy, terrible things in our lives. But then I read about someone who punched his own ticket on an N Train track in Astoria, raining gore on the street below. I’m struck by the fragility of life, and how many people choose to find escape rather than continue. It puts the things I’m currently struggling with in my life in perspective. I’d be lying if I said I’d never had those same impulses in the course of my life. I think, to one extent or another, far more people do than will ever admit it.

I don’t know if what I have is a gene or if it’s teachable. But, in those tough moments where I can’t see the clear way through obstacles ahead, or when I feel like I’ve been tasting my own teeth more often than not, I have a mantra. I repeat this to myself to remind me to get my head back in the game and press on.

I stole it from a San Shou school in Boston eons ago:

I am a fighter.I will get hit.I will hit back.

If it helps you in the slightest, steal it from me and pass it on. We need you in the fight, too.

If someone you know exhibits warning signs of suicide: do not leave the person alone, remove any firearms, alcohol, drugs or sharp objects that could be used in a suicide attempt, and call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or take the person to an emergency room or seek help from a medical or mental health professional.

September 2005 – I arrive only with what I can carry. Some well-worn and ugly luggage, a laptop bag, and a handful of garments on hangers. The rest of my stuff, not a lot of things after downsizing, sits in storage.

I arrive as so many did, with nothing to my name. No job, no money, just the hope that better life waits for me in New York. My Ellis Island is a cramped living room in Astoria. The first few weeks are a scramble, I chase down any sort of work I can find, interviewing wherever possible. I learn the subways as I go. I learn to sleep through the night on my friends’ sofa, even when their cats have other thoughts on the matter.

Six weeks into the adventure, I accept a job as part of the launch team of Top of the Rock Observation Deck at Rockefeller Center.

December 2006 – She’s leaving for Japan at the end of a long weekend. It’s been an unconventional relationship, long-distance, among other complications. But for this one weekend, this last weekend, we’re together and I can share my city with her. She’s never been here before, and I want to do it right. We see some of the sights, but the best moments are always the ones the guide books never tell you about.

She loves to cook and has been promising me she’d make her jambalaya After some research she finds a place that seems to sell quality andouie sausage. Her eyes light up as we walk into Esposito’s in Hell’s Kitchen. The smell of meat hangs in the air and it’s clear we’ve chosen well. The jambalaya is amazing, some of the best I’ve ever had, including restaurants in NOLA. The weekend is wonderful and bittersweet. Farewells are difficult and her flight from JFK will take her out of the country and out of my life.

I knew I loved New York before now, but now I know the joy of sharing it with someone I care about. New York is best when shared.

August 2007 – My 30th birthday party. I’m surrounded by friends from my personal and work lives. My life, frequently so compartmentalized, crosses over on a night where everyone is happy and drinking. People get to know each other as the night goes on, and I feel, for the first time, like I’m really succeeding in New York.

I’m living the dream. Modest professional success, good friends, and plenty of time and opportunity to explore and engage the city. 30 is a winning number.

December 2008 – I’ve been out of work for a few weeks, having lost my job right before Thanksgiving. I’m so focused on getting back into an office that it isn’t until I’m having drinks with a professional contact that another way is apparent to me. Why don’t I consult, she asks? Why don’t I use my knowledge and experience as a freelancer? We discuss it further, knocking back whiskeys and talking personal branding and business strategy.

As Christmas approaches, I know I have a difficult conversation to have with my girlfriend. She’s in grad school and I’m paying the majority of our rent and bills. But will she be willing and able to support me taking a risk? To help me build a business in New York?

July 2009 – The six-month contract with my biggest freelance client is nearing a close. They make me an offer. I can come on board full-time or I can train someone to do my job internally. Either way, my consulting gig with them is coming to an end. The offer is low. My instinct is to walk away from it and continue to focus on building my business with other clients. I’ve had a lot of meetings recently, written a slew of proposals. But there is an air of uncertainty. The recession is still pretty new and nobody knows where the economy will go.

I can’t make the decision alone. Not when I’m responsible for more than myself. Ultimately, I’m convinced to ignore my instinct in favor of stability. It feels like a mistake from the moment I accept the job, which never bodes well. But sometimes we make decisions based on need. Or fear of uncertainty. Despite the best intentions of everyone involved, it’s a bad idea. Within weeks of taking the position, four different companies I’d pitched get back to me about proposals they’d been mulling over. They all want to work with me and I’m locked into a full-time position. I curse myself for choosing fear.

September 2010 – I stand at a crossroads. As the end of another contract approaches, I have nothing in particular on the horizon. Single for the first time in over two years, I have nothing holding me in place. I love New York, but I realize that I can do anything I want. Go anywhere I want. I have the kind of freedom that doesn’t often come around and I should really take advantage of it.

So I do. I pack up everything I own, so much more than the things I could carry with me five years prior, and I put it all into storage in a friend’s garage out in Long Island. Two days after my gig ends, I hit the road. I spend seven weeks traveling the country by train, exploring, flirting with other cities behind New York’s back.

November 2011 – After a year of living in Los Angeles, I return home to New York, just in time for the bitter cold of winter. I’m freelancing full-time, but all of my clients are on the west coast, so I’m keeping odd hours.

A friend in the Bronx was looking for a roommate around when I was looking to return to New York, so I find myself in a neighborhood I don’t quite fit in, missing many of the creature comforts I associated with my New York experience, and having to take the train 45 minutes to an hour for any kind of social life. It’s a tough adjustment.

February 2012 – I’m working seven days a week on a big community management project. I haven’t taken a full day off since Christmas and it’s taking its toll. I’m missing the camaraderie of an office. Hell, the change of scenery alone would be amazing. Every day I wake up and fire up the laptop. I’m working before I have a drop of caffeine. I’m usually putting the last touches on things before I fall asleep at night.

For two months I see very little beyond my computer and Parkchester. It’s an isolating experience, something I could do anywhere. I don’t feel connected to the city. I don’t feel connected to my life. I need to find a balance point in my life, location, and job.

May 2013 – My hunt for work, freelance or full-time is at a fevered pitch. I’ve reorganized my resume as an infographic, I’ve adopted new strategies in personal branding. I feel reinvigorated, rising to the new challenges of the job market, determined to succeed.

I’m about to move to Brooklyn with my girlfriend. The thought of it makes me obnoxiously happy. She loves the city like I do. We find the same manic joy out of discovering something new here. We love local beers and neighborhood restaurants. We love just walking through the city until our feet hurt. I get to share New York with her! How awesome is that? What’s more, she believes in me, something that is crucial in a partner when you’re attempting to redefine your career.

Once more I find myself at a crossroads. I’m excited for what the future holds.

]]>https://kevintalbotexp.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/turning-points/feed/0CZstreetsignktalbotexpImageTrue Story: I was an Internet Punkhttps://kevintalbotexp.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/true-story-i-was-an-internet-punk/
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“It’s just punk rock, man. You don’t have to know how to play. You just have to be a punk.”

I sat for hours at that diner counter, nursing my caffeine, chain-smoking cheap cigarettes. It was 1996, 9 years before I quit smoking, and still several years before it was banned from Boston restaurants. Deli-Haus always had a bit of a smokey haze in those days. I was freelancing as a young writer and (mostly) paying my bills with a graveyard shift at a convenience store. I huddled over a spiral-bound notebook, furiously scribbling away my afternoon. I looked every bit the 19 year-old wannabe poet.

It wasn’t poetry being scrawled on those pages. I was writing code. I didn’t own a computer at that point, but a friend had been letting me use his password to access the Boston University computer labs. I’d been studying HTML tutorials online, printing them out, and writing my website in a notebook. When I’d get computer access, I’d transcribe batches of code and play around with it until it was a complete site. This was in the early, primitive days of Geocities and Tripod free website hosting. It was raw and crude, punk rock web development. We didn’t know what it would be, but every link, every email, every chat was a new connection to a world beyond the places we lived.

Unlike some of my other friends and peers from those days, I was never dedicated enough to becoming a professional web developer that I studied the new iterations of web language. Javascript? PHP? Cold Fusion? I can’t code any of them. I’m a bit more 3-chord than that, which partially explains how I wound up working with social media rather than developing sites.

I think of those early days, using Pine for email, building tiny, personal sites for audiences that were an open mic night compared to the arena rock of today’s internet. Nobody understood the power of what we were playing with, especially the major media players. In those days Disinfo effectively had as big a digital footprint as Newscorp.

Over the years, the internet experience has simultaneously become more and less tame. Once it became clear that there was money to be had, the corporations tried to set up shop, some meeting more success than others. Some tiny internet start-ups grew to become major corporations in their own right. But the internet is still an unwieldy beast of a medium, and people are still figuring out how to make it do the things they want. When a new idea sticks around long enough to become an institution like Facebook, people start to get the hang of it, methods become rote. But, and here’s the thing, every new application or device presents new opportunities and challenges. Every new development is another gang of unruly teenagers banging away in a garage trying to make something that sounds like music.

Some community managers prefer the safe route, focused on what tested and true strategies exist for this iteration of the social web. I’ve certainly tried to be that guy when a client called for it, and having worked traditional marketing gigs it’s very easy to fall into the trap of treating community management like a traditional marketing venture. But you don’t make Raw Power by rote.

The truly amazing thing of building a community and brand in this era is that it’s all so fluid. You never know which technology will be the next Pinterest, or which will vanish like Google Wave. It’s difficult to predict which approach will take off in a viral fashion. Anyone who says different is either a genius or a liar. Maybe both.

You need internet punks. Don’t confuse that with being somehow too true to yourself to sell a product (we’re not internet hippies here, people). The Sex Pistols were the world’s most cleverly disguised boy band, assembled by Malcom Mclaren to become cartoon rock stars and sell his clothing. It is the blueprint every would-be viral creator and community manager should aspire to. It was relevant, putting a face on pre-existing subcultural trends he’d seen with the New York Dolls. It grew in the telling, like every good meme does. It eventually became something bigger, a scene, a culture. Punk as a cultural identifier is branding made manifest over the generations. It’s calling cotton swabs Q-Tips, or soda Coke. And they’re still wearing clothes in McClaren’s style 35 years later.

I’ve ditched the spiral-bound notebook for an Android tablet. I still work from wherever suits me, but wifi is a priority these days. The tools grow and change with time, but the ethic remains the same. You need to be able to adjust on the fly, but put your back into it. Play with your heart on your sleeve and Mclaren’s sneaky, capitalist sneer on your face. The internet is still a place for crazy, punk rock tactics. Still a place where you can hear the fuzzy crackle of vinyl amid the pristine sound of a digital world. That’s a good thing. It means we’re still only getting started.

I spent several hours focused on turning my resume into an infographic, using a service offered by the start-up vizualize.me. The finished product is here. (I like how the site works, but I’ll be happier when they add pdf exportability) It’s a competitive job market right now, in the same sense that the Hunger Games are a competition. If your field is the least bit creative, you’re damned if you don’t have a resume exponentially more interesting than the ones your parents used to mail out.

I’m a people person. A connector. I excel at the face to face. Shake my hand, sit down with me and let’s tell stories. My story. Your story. The story of your brand. It’s helped me through countless job interviews and client meetings. But, increasingly, there are new hurdles to get to the face to face. Online tests, elaborate pre-screenings, incredibly specific application questions.

It can be frustrating, coming up against an electronic wall, keeping you at a distance from those personal connections.

It’s an amazing time to be hiring, having the pick of so many qualified (frequently overqualified) applicants. If I were an HR manager, I might be inclined to put these same hoops in place, to find only the best, most qualified candidates with a passion for my industry or product.

However, if we’re to be honest, some of the best work experiences come from stepping into unlikely situations and finding your way from there. The old adage is: hire for attitude, train for experience. The new paradigm is to expect both out off the gate. But that’s too narrow. Overspecializing, as a job-seeker or a recruiter, risks missing that perfect connection. Lightning doesn’t strike where you tell it to.

I was very content to freelance for the past few years. The freedom, that entrepreneurial spirit, really does agree with me. However, a few things have inspired me to return to a full-time position.

Last summer, I got very sick. Without sick days, I tried to power through, making it worse rather than recovering. Without insurance, the costs of treatment were as painful as being ill.

Over the last few months, I’ve spent more time hunting for clients than actually working. On top of that, a cold winter and working from home meant a lot of isolation. As I mentioned, I’m a people person. Too much isolation isn’t especially healthy for me.

So here’s the deal: I’m turning the tables. I’m recruiting my next challenge. I’m looking for a company with a culture that fits, good to amazing benefits, and people with a sense of humor to balance their serious work ethic. A company that does more good than evil. A company that will appreciate my time and effort.

That’s it. Industry honestly doesn’t matter. I’m an experienced sales, marketing, and social media pro. I’ve got experience with journalism, travel & tourism, and real estate. But I’m willing to learn vastly new skills if people are willing to train on the job. Wherever I go, I’m excited to grow with the right company. I don’t promise you my life or my eternal soul. I definitely don’t promise to get your logo inked on my skin. But I promise you will get everything you pay for and then some while I’m with you.

I don’t own a lot of things. I’ve moved a lot over the years, and I tend to downsize with each move. So it always amazes me when I happen across something I’d completely forgotten existed.

In this case it was the discovery of a 13 year-old composition notebook. I flipped through it, and found myself exploring a time capsule from a Kevin I barely remember. It’s full of short story and comic plot threads, half-formed ideas, hazy dreams of occult terrorism and flying saucers, horrible doodles, and notes on articles I was writing for the Weekly Dig.

I lamented about an ex-girlfriend (I wrote a terrible song about her once. It’s criminally embarrassing). I scrawled thumbnails for a comic script. The notebook is full of context-free notes about my life at the time. I had a website on Tripod and made periodic spoken word performances in Boston. I spelled magic with a “ck”. I was a smart-ass little bastard who thought he knew something about the world.

It’s humbling to look at the dreck I was producing in the year 2000. But also reassuring. I couldn’t have predicted half of the wild and amazing turns my life would take in the intervening years. For all the crazy ideas and dreams I scribbled in that notebook, I didn’t see a world with Facebook or Twitter, a world where I’d be a seasoned traveler who fell madly in love with New York. A world where I’d be preparing to move to my third borough.

13 years ago, Bush was a candidate, 9-11 was a phone number, and the man who would be our first black president wasn’t a blip on anyone’s radar. Cell phones weren’t omnipresent, and they definitely weren’t smart. I had no idea the friends I would make or lose. Didn’t have clue one about the injuries I’d inflict on my heart in pursuit of some tiny understanding of the amazingness of love. No idea the tears I would cry when I lost my grandfather, or those I wouldn’t cry at my father’s passing. 13 years ago, nobody paused in awkward contemplation when you said the words “Boston Marathon”.

There’s something very comforting in that notebook. So much can happen in 13 years. Good and ill. For me. For the world. The future is unwritten.

Where will we be in 2026? Where will I be? I’m excited to figure that out.

]]>https://kevintalbotexp.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/time-capsule-from-the-year-2000/feed/0ktalbotexp465px-Comp1.png5 Days of Awesome: The Ice Cream Man Comethhttps://kevintalbotexp.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/5-days-of-awesome-the-ice-cream-man-cometh/
https://kevintalbotexp.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/5-days-of-awesome-the-ice-cream-man-cometh/#respondWed, 24 Apr 2013 17:20:57 +0000http://kevintalbotexp.wordpress.com/?p=2170]]>It’s been a slow Spring so far. The last few days had that kind of damp cold that clings to the bones. San Francisco weather in New York. Chill days have outnumbered warm ones, but the weather is slowly turning. Plants are blooming, birds are chirping and Mister Softee is out on the street corners.

The Mister Softee truck, camped out on local street corners, is my favorite harbinger of better days to come. Forget Puxatawney Phil the groundhog, I measure the arrival of Spring in the number of ice cream trucks I spot on city streets. It’s a desert equinox.

Beneath the surface visual of the truck emerging after a winter in storage, there is the weird undercurrent that is unmistakably New York. The rivalries and turf disputes between various food vendors, especially those between Mister Softee and the smaller outfits that sometimes crop up. It makes me imagine some sort of ice cream mob, beefing over territory, dividing the city up between them. But, then again, truth is usually stranger than fiction.

Every truck is a landmark on the road to warmer days. Every time that muzak jingle gets stuck in your head you’re learning the song of Springtime in New York.

Spring is here. Summer is coming. There is promise and possibility in the air. Embrace it.

]]>https://kevintalbotexp.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/5-days-of-awesome-the-ice-cream-man-cometh/feed/0wpid-MisterSoftee700.jpgktalbotexp5 Days of Awesome: A Series of Tubes!https://kevintalbotexp.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/5-days-of-awesomeness-a-series-of-tubes/
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The F train is less scenic, unless you count people watching.

Roosevelt Island is a fascinating place. This sparsely populated (for New York) island in the East River is full of surprises. Of course, a lot of people know it best from the tram you can use to get there, as seen in Spider-Man and other films. Others know of its allegedly haunted history with old mental hospitals.

Each residential tower on the island has trash chutes that connect to an underground system of tubes. Five times a day, turbines are turned on and the trash is sucked through a tube. The trash moves at an average of 30 mph to its destination.

Trash sucking turbines. Photo by Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

The garbage system of the future then collects all the trash at a central facility where it is separated with centrifugal force. The trash is then compacted and hauled away by city trucks.

Refuse handling brochure from the 1970’s

I think this is really neat stuff. Just fascinating. I’m not sure you could really add a system like this to an existing city infrastructure. But since Roosevelt Island wasn’t developed until the 70’s, it was perfect for this kind of experiment. I wonder if there aren’t other ways we could re-imagine trash collection in the city as new neighborhoods get heavily developed.

The rest of the city has a seriously outmoded trash collection, with bags being left on the street outside of trash bins. I think its fair to say that contributes to the rat problems in some of the city’s most densely populated quarters.

If not pneumatic tubes for other parts of New York, what about some kind of variation on the MTA’s trash trains? Local collecting points could be collected underground in the middle of the night.

I have no idea. I’m not any sort of civil engineer. I just wish we were still showing the kind of innovation we did in the 1970’s when it comes to finding new ways to deal with waste in a city of 8.5 million people.

Until that improves, there’s always Roosevelt Island and its amazing series of tubes.

Entertainment news has been buzzing with talk about a remake of Point Break. Setting aside my fundamental aggravation at the never-ending cycle of lazy remakes that the entertainment industry churns out, I would instead like to focus on the greatness that is Point Break. I’m not writing an in-depth review, here. Just celebrating awesomeness.

If you haven’t seen it, do so. It’s part of the action movie canon. Yes, it’s a dumb action movie. It is, in fact, the quintessential dumb action movie. Not only do you not need to remake Point Break, you no longer need to make any dumb action movies (though I will accept more smart homages to dumb, like Hot Fuzz). Kathryn Bigelow may get all the accolades now for Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, but her freshman film is pretty much perfect at being what it needs to be.

The dialogue hits all the right notes. It’s catchy and memorable. Even when it’s awful it work. It has a sense of humor without putting the tongue too firmly in cheek. Most of the best lines belong to Patrick Swayze, but everyone has their moments.

Long before buddy movies embraced their homoerotic undertones with the term “bromance”, Swayze’s Bodhi Dharma and Keanu Reeve’s Johhny Utah have a film chemistry that puts many romantic couplings to shame. Lori Petty (who I love) is the theoretical romantic foil, but that doesn’t ring true to the vibe onscreen.

Johnny Utah is the straight-laced athlete seduced into Bodhi’s world of male bonding and flouting society’s rules. The subtext is so gay it’s barely subtext. It’s a secretly gay surfing/skydiving/bank robbing action movie. And it works.

And that action? It’s so well done. Surfing scenes. Bank robberies. Two skydiving sequences. Fist fights. And the chase. Everybody does the car chase, but few movies pull off the foot chase. Bigelow managed to direct one of the greatest foot chases in film history. I’ll go so far as to say the best of the pre-parkour era.

Unfortunately, the only version of the chase on youtube isn’t embeddable. So you’ll have to make with the clicky to see what I’m talking about.

No remake can live up to the perfect storm of factors that make Point Break what it is. Just enjoy it.

Tom Waits is one of my personal favorite musicians. He’s a brilliant storyteller, an innovative performer who manages to be simultaneously charming and haunting. I can’t think of a better soundtrack to a rambling, possibly probably hungover Sunday morning/afternoon.

If you can’t pull yourself out of bed, but feel you need some religion in your Sunday, there’s always “Chocolate Jesus” seen here from a performance on Letterman.

Maybe you’re wondering if the horrible things last night mean you’ll always be alone? Perhaps it seems hopeless when you look at the pile of laundry that’s in the various states “between clean and dirty”. For you, we reach back to the classic album Nighthawks at the Diner. The rambling intro is almost as good as the song itself with “Better Off Without a Wife”

By about this point I imagine you’ve started drinking again. You might call it brunch, but we both know it’s the hair of the dog you crave. Go ahead and have another, get afternoon drunk. If you start sounding like Tom in “The Piano Has Been Drinking”, you’re cut off.

Stagger home. Smile. The weather hasn’t been amazing, but we’re finally seeing the turning of the seasons after a winter that just hung around, clinging to our bones. Relax, read a book. “You Can Never Hold Back Spring.”